Frequently Asked Questions...
Purple Flowering Dogwood Tree?
I am looking for a tree-type dogwood that yields purple flowers. In a quick search I found the Satomi variety and the Purple Glory but in pictures some of them appear more pink or reddish than purple. This may be a picture quality issue but can anyone testify as to whether these varieties are truly purple in real life? Any suggestions on what other varieties to look at?
Answer:
If you're looking for violet-purple, you could be out of luck. I've heard Purple Glory's flower bracts described as dark red. I think it gets its name from purplish foliage, especially fall foliage.
Dogwood Pink
Pink Dogwood Tree
Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida)
Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida ) is a species of dogwood native to eastern North America, from southern Maine west to southern Ontario, Illinois, and eastern Kansas, and south to northern Florida and eastern Texas.
Flowering Dogwood is a small deciduous tree attaining a height ogf approximately 33 ft. It is often wider that it is tall at maturity. Trunk diameter can be up to 1 ft. The Dogwood's leaves are opposite, simple, approximately 2-5 inches long and 4-6 inches broad. If one were to examine a leaf under a microscope its entire margin exhibits a very finely toothed edge.
The flowers are individually small and inconspicuous, with four greenish-yellow petals 4 mm long. Around 20 flowers are produced in a dense, rounded, flower-head, 1–2 cm in diameter. The flower-head is surrounded by four conspicuous large white, pink or red "petals" (actually bracts), each bract 3 cm long and 2.5 cm broad, rounded, and often with a distinct notch at the apex. The flowers are bisexual.
While most of the wild trees have white bracts, some selected cultivars of this tree also have pink bracts, some even almost a true red. They typically flower in early April in the southern part of their range, to late April or early May in northern and high altitude areas.
The fruit is a cluster of two to ten drupes, each 10–15 mm long and about 8 mm wide, which ripen in the late summer and the early fall to a bright red, or occasionally yellow with a rosy blush. They are an important food source for dozens of species of birds, which then distribute the seeds.
Flowering Dogwood does best in moist, acidic soil in a location that has late afternoon shade, but good morning sun. It does not do well when exposed to intense heat sources such as adjacent parking lots or air conditioning compressors. It also has a low salinity tolerance. In urban and suburban settings, care should be taken not to inflict mower damage on the trunk or roots, as this increases the tree's susceptibility to disease and pest pressure.
Dogwood canker and anthracnose are general terms for a large number of different plant diseases, characterised by broadly similar symptoms including the appearance of small areas of dead tissue, which grow slowly, often over a period of years. Some are of only minor consequence, but others are ultimately lethal, and could create serious economic damage in agriculture and horticulture.
Different cankers and anthracnoses are caused by a wide range of organisms, including fungi, bacteria, mycoplasmas and viruses. The majority of canker-causing organisms are tied obligately to a single host species or genus, but a few will attack a wider range of plants. Canker can be spread by weather and animals, making an area that even has a slight amount of canker hazardous.
Some cankers are treatable with fungicides or bactericides, but many are not; often the only treatment available is to destroy the infected plant to prevent the disease from spreading to other plants.
About the Author
I am a retired aerospace engineer that has acquired over the years a rewarding hobby of gardening and landscapes. Within the scope of my new hobby, I have been fortunate enough to further my freelance writing career under contract to www.tnnursery.com by supplying them with informative articles about our wonderfule plant kingdom. It is this admiration for our plant kingdom that I enjoy bring new knowledge and skill to help us better understand our plants.
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